FR8

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Fleet Management

FR8 Star is a San Francisco startup aiming to improve the freight industry with cloud-based tools. Their online application makes fleet management hassle-free. Through fr8.guru you can locate shipments, optimize fleet schedules and identify available capacity on freight truck routes, and sell this capacity to shippers that need it.

The goal of this Software as a Service(SaaS) product is to reduce inefficiencies in the $700 billion US trucking market that result in lost revenue, increased pollution and traffic, and poor working conditions for its 3.5 million drivers.

Capicua was asked to design and build FR8’s advanced SaaS platform.

REQUIREMENTS

Easy to UseFR8’s wanted their application to present complex data but still be easy to navigate and understand. Capicua created the design using Material UI, a popular library of elements that offer clean and intuitive user interactions.

We had to take into consideration the formats in which the application would be used in workplaces, designing interfaces that function well on smaller screen sizes.Also, users can make changes to data inline, simplifying the editing process.

Reusable ComponentsFR8 requested that the user interface include reusable components. This will make future additions to the platform modular and quicker to implement.

Track Shipments and DriversIt was essential to integrate the application with Google Maps and Street View. All addresses in the application needed to be shown in Street View where available, and positioned in Google Maps according to freight routes.

API Call ManagementIn the loading process the application has to make several calls to APIs to retrieve information. Since APIs have differing rates of speed, this can make an interface load elements unevenly. In order to ensure that all elements would be displayed at the same time, we designed a Node layer that would act as an intermediary between the frontend and the backend APIs.